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Monthly Archives: July 2011

Many thanks for stopping by and reading our blog. Now that the campaign is up and running, we need to let as many people as possible know about it and expose the magnitude of the damage Trinity Mirror are doing to the Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail – and put pressure on them to change their plans.

1. Telephone or write to the editor-in chief Bruce Waddell and the managing director Mark Hollinshead expressing your concern/anger about the destructon of these iconic Scottish newspapers. Cal 0141 309 3000 and ask for their offices or write to them at Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail, One Central Quay, Glasgow G3 8DA. Let us know if you do – just leave a blog comment or tell us on Facebook.

3. Tell your MP and MSPs and local councillors that you are supporting our campaign and ask them to do likewise. Most of them will already know about what is happening at the Record and Mail as the NUJ has been lobbying them since this crisis began. But the more people that contact them, the better.

A handy way of finding out the names of all your elected representatives is to enter your postcode at this site: http://www.writetothem.com/

Many of them are on Facebook and it is easy to leave them a quick message there. Some also have their own websites, where you can leave them a message. Alternatively, you can get telephone numbers and addresses for MPs here: http://www.parliament.uk/about/contacting/mp/.

4. If you are following any Scottish celebrities on Twitter – or non-Scots who are known campaigners, such as Father Ted writer Graham Linehan (@glinner) – send them links to the FB page and/or the blog and ask them to retweet. Similarly, if you are a fan of any Scots or campaigners on Facebook, leave a post on their wall linking to our sites.

5. Tell all your friends offline, too and urge them all to check out our blog and Facebook page.

6. If you have a blog or website of your own, please post a message about our campaign and include links to our sites.

If you have any other ideas about how to boost the campaign, please leave a comment here or on our facebook page.

Again, many thanks for your time and support. Together, we can keep the Daily Record and Sunday Mail Scottish.

After more than 100 years as Scottish institutions, The Daily Record and The Sunday Mail are on the brink.

Following last month’s announcement of 90 job losses – around 40% of the editorial staff – the papers’ owners in London, Trinity Mirror, have now done the one thing readers and journalists were always assured would never happen.

They are trying to turn your newspapers into token Scottish editions of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror.

Just over a decade ago, they tried to launch a Scottish edition of the Mirror. It failed, not because of any lack of effort or ability on the part of the journalists who worked on it – but because Scottish readers had no appetite for a Daily Mirror with a few token Scottish trimmings.

Yet now they are trying it again – only in a more subtle, sneaky way.

This week, you will have noticed a sudden, dramatic change to the design and layout of the Record. This was carried out for one reason only – to mimic the design of the Mirror and make it easier for pages written and produced in London to be pasted directly into your Daily Record and Sunday Mail.

From the start of August, approximately half of the content in the Record and Mail will be written, designed and sub-edited in England. This includes a significant proportion of the news content and almost all of the features content, including long-established, much-loved sections such as Woman and Vital, along with supplements and our magazines.

The news pages will be produced in London and the features work has been sub-contracted out to the Press Association in Howden, Yorkshire.

The Trinity Mirror board think that you won’t notice what’s happening and they can sneak these scandalous changes past you – but already hundreds of our loyal readers have called or written in to complain. In addition, outraged Scottish politicians and are busy lobbying the Trinity Mirror board in London and their Scottish executives, demanding that they halt their catastrophic plans.

We are now calling on you, our readers, to help us fight these changes.

These proud papers have been at the centre of Scottish media culture for more than 100 years. They’ve provided excellent news, sport and cultural reportage and analysis during that time – stories written by the people of Scotland, about the people of Scotland, for the people of Scotland.

If the Trinity Mirror board get their way, Scottish content in the Record and Mail will be piecemeal.

Real-life Scottish features will be replaced by real-life English ones.
Scottish showbiz coverage will be drastically reduced.
UK and international news will be written in England for an English audience.
What Scottish news remains will be competing for space with homogenised, non-specific, space-filling content from agencies and English papers.

Trinity Mirror will claim that times are hard for newspapers and tough decisions have to be made. And it’s true that many newspaper groups in the UK are struggling to survive.

Given that the Scottish market is a tenth of the size of the English market, this means the Record and the Mail are disproportionately profitable for Trinity Mirror. Yet the board seem hell-bent on destroying them.

Trinity Mirror’s overall profits for 2010, reported in March this year, were £123.3million – UP 17% on 2009. This represented a hefty 16.2% profit margin (up from 13.8%) on group revenue of £761.5million. Many companies would be delighted with a 16% profit margin in the good times, never mind the middle of a global recession.

Times are hard, they tell us – yet in the past 11 years, Trinity Mirror annual reports reveal profits totaling nearly £2BILLION.

Times are hard – yet last year the group’s chief executive Sly Bailey took a £1.6million pay and bonus package, the latest in a long-line of seven-figure rewards, while thousands of staff across Trinity Mirror have been kicked out on the street. Now almost 100 Scottish journalists and their families are losing sleep about their futures and whether they will be able to pay their bills next month.

You may well speculate about the motives for such a baffling strategy and what it may imply about their attitudes towards, and their long-term plans for, the Daily Record and Sunday Mail.

Make no mistake, this is the start of a process that could ultimately see the Daily Record and Sunday Mail brands disappear from Scotland forever.

If they get away with this first step, it is more than likely that more Scottish journalists will be axed in the near future and the Scottish content of the papers will diminish even further.

This site is designed to raise awareness about these unprecedented cuts and, especially, the Anglifcation of a product considered to be as much a part of Scottish society and culture as Irn-Bru, The Old Firm, whisky and Tunnock’s.

We also hope that you will help us spread the word on Facebook, Twitter and across the internet.

The Record and The Mail are determinedly Scottish products and what is happening to them amounts cultural vandalism.

Please “Like” our Facebook site – there’s a link to it at the top of the column to your right – and link to it via Twitter and whatever other social media tools you have at your disposal – and ask your friends to do the same.

If you have any questions or comments, please post them here and we will respond as best we can.

You may also wish to contact managing director Mark Hollinshead and editor Bruce Waddell to complain about these plans. Call 0141 309 3000 and ask for their offices or write to them at: Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail, One Central Quay, Glasgow G3 8DA. If you do, leave a message here to let us know you have.

Please join our fight and spread the word about the fact that two of the few truly Scottish newspapers currently face losing half of their staff and half their content – and, as a result, their entire Scottish identity.

In newspapers with a proud history of campaigning and a sure moral compass, the one story we are not being allowed to publish is the one about the crusading Scottish workplace losing half its staff to drive up profits for profiteering English paymasters.

This is not about people pledging allegiance to the Daily Record or anti-English bias.

This is about people showing their disgust at corporate greed.
Showing their support for a vibrant Scottish press in Scotland as we head towards an independence referendum.
And raising awareness about the plight of the Scottish newspaper industry, which is on the brink of disappearing altogether.

We appreciate your support.

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Our Campaign

This is the official blog of the campaign to Save Our Scottish Daily Record and Sunday Mail. We are fighting to prevent the destruction of newspapers that have been produced in Scotland, for Scots for more than 100 years. Please back our campaign to prevent their transformation into second-rate Scottish editions of the Daily and Sunday Mirror.